When Maxon met Sunny, he was seven years, four months, and
eighteen-days old. Or, he was 2693 rotations of the earth old. Maxon was
different. Sunny was different. They were different together.
Now, twenty years later, they are married, and Sunny wants, more
than anything, to be “normal.” She’s got the housewife thing down perfectly,
but Maxon, a genius engineer, is on a NASA mission to the
moon, programming robots for a new colony.
Once they were two outcasts who found unlikely love in
each other: a wondrous, strange relationship formed from urgent desire for
connection. But now they’re parents to an autistic son. And Sunny is pregnant
again. And her mother is dying in the hospital. Their marriage is on
the brink of imploding, and they’re at each other’s throats with blame and
fear. What exactly has gone wrong?
Sunny wishes Maxon would turn the rocket around and come
straight-the-hell home.
When an accident in space puts the mission in peril, everything
Sunny and Maxon have built hangs in the balance. Dark secrets, long-forgotten
murders, and a blond wig all come tumbling to the light. And nothing will ever
be the same.…
A debut of singular power and intelligence, Shine Shine
Shine is a unique love story, an adventure between worlds, and a
stunning novel of love, death, and what it means to be human.
“Over the moon with a metaphysical spin. Heart-tugging…it is
struggling to understand the physical realities of life and the nature of what
makes us human….Nicely unpredictable…Extraordinary.” —Janet Maslin, The
New York Times
“Shine
Shine Shine” is able to draw readers into its tender, not-quite-human scheme of
things because Ms. Netzer treats this as the only reasonable way to look at the
world. “Sunny had come up bald from the cradle, and stayed bald throughout her
life,” she writes unfussily. “She had been born at some point, and at some
point in the future she would die. What happened in between was one long,
hairless episode.”
The main
story, the part of the book that isn’t fantasy or flashback, is triggered by
the end of Sunny’s five-year phase of motherhood and wig wearing. She began
wearing hair to make her first child’s life as normal as possible. And “five
years in a wig can really make a girl feel blond,” Ms. Netzer writes. But one
day Sunny’s minivan flies off course — just as the spaceship carrying Maxon
will be thrown off its path to safety.
Lydia Netzer
“Could such
a woman ever explain herself?” Ms. Netzer asks about Sunny’s colossal lineup of
peculiar problems. Yes, she can. The book offers much to ponder about balancing
a coolly mechanistic mind-set with a deep awareness of the precariousness of
life. Sunny doesn’t mention any famous song lyrics. But she is steadily focused
on the thought that he not busy being born is busy dying.
Had Ms.
Netzer approached her material in a more linear fashion, she would have run
into credibility problems. But as her Web site acknowledges — complete with a
calendar full of scribbled notes about how to fix the novel’s structure — she
wound up shuffling parts of her narrative. So “Shine Shine Shine” skips through
time in nicely unpredictable fashion. Part is set in Burma, where Sunny is
born. Part is about the blossoming of Sunny and Maxon’s childhood friendship.
Part is about the college years when Sunny found herself madly attracted to a
guy just because the guy had very long hair.
And
there’s an extraordinary scene in which Sunny’s mother, then young and vital,
disciplines a pony with threats and a baseball bat. “Does the pony like it
here?” the mother asks. “Does he like his nice home? Does he enjoy being alive?
Does the pony know how lucky he is?” In its own weird way Ms. Netzer’s book
asks those questions of us all. —Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Find this book and click here: Shine Shine Shine
